Vince Clarke is a man synonymous with synth pop and a legend in the history of electronic music. He’s famous for founding three of the most popular and lasting musical acts in history: Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure. But his distinct sonic output depends upon another feat: he has spent the last 30 years amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of rare, ‘holy grail’ analogue synthesizers.

In 2004, Clarke left England for the unsynthesized woods of Maine, where he constructed a temple for these monolithic machines he calls ‘The Cabin,”. and began branching out into (gasp!) software synths too. Recently Motherboard made a pilgrimage to Clarke’s purpose-built digital/analogue studio to meet the musical titan, hear the story of his musical journey, learn how to make the perfect pop song, and get a little demonstration of one of his signature moves: building a drum pattern from a wall of modular synths. To Clarke, music is still magic even now, an alchemy in which he gets to make “something from nothing.”